Page 17 of The Sixth Fraction

I’ve been here before—for birth celebrations, for funerals, for religious services, for our infrequent holiday celebrations. But I’ve never seen it like this. Lanterns outline the room in light, and there’s a long wooden table in the center with benches on either side. The initiates sit, the five girls on one side and the three boys on the other, and I don’t know what comes next.

Then my mother sets a plate in front of me, and my father sets down a fork, a knife, a spoon. Other people—friends, neighbors, people I’ve seen on the street—keep stepping forward with things: a slice of warm bread. A heap of cooked grains. A scoop of slow-roasted vegetables, soft and smoky. A drizzle of dark sauce—a rare addition. A side plate with lettuce dressed in oil and vinegar. Someone behind us says a prayer I can barely hear, and we all hesitate.

“Eat!” someone calls out, and someone else laughs. The spell is broken, and the initiates dig in.

It feels uncomfortable to eat while so many people surround us, watching. But a moment later someone starts singing.

The other factions think Abnegation has no games, has no music, has no celebrations. But we just keep them to ourselves. And true, we don’t have the same instruments the other factions do—but a voice is an instrument, too.

One voice starts the round, and another joins in, in harmony with the first. Other voices add to the song, and then another song starts beneath the first one, filling in all its pauses and then twisting together with it, like hands clasping and then unclasping.

The song gets louder as everyone else joins in, every voice finding a place, even the old, creaky ones; even the tuneless ones; even the weak ones. The two songs line up next to each other like a key fitting into a lock, one supplying everything the other one needs in order to move.

As I relax and let myself really listen, I realize that I’ve heard both songs before. One of them is about the founding of the city, and the other is about helping your neighbor and trusting that he’ll help you—a standard Abnegation song they teach to children.

The songs aren’t just working together in their music, but in their messages, too—telling the story of our city, and showing the place that Abnegation has inside it. Helping. Filling in the gaps. Trusting each other.

My eyes prickle with tears, but this time they’re the good kind. I set my fork down, close my eyes, and listen.

2

Initiate

Chapter 9

Caleb

Caleb tries not to pay attention as the group dwindles. One by one, his fellow initiates have solved the riddle in front of them, whispered it to the labyrinth’s guardian, and passed through the leaves to Erudite headquarters beyond it. Now it’s just him and three others—Felicity, who chose after his sister did, a Candor boy whose name Caleb didn’t learn, and one Erudite boy who appears to be hyperventilating.

Caleb is overheating. The gray jacket he’s still wearing is sticking to the back of his neck. He’s panting a little, too, and with each second that passes and his mind remains blank, it gets even harder to breathe.

He can’t solve it. He doesn’t know how to. He was raised with a straightforwardness that he now finds infuriating, the moral strictures of his upbringing failing him as soon as he calls upon himself to think abstractly.

That must be why the Candor boy is here, too, struggling just as much as he is. Candor and Abnegation have one quality in common, and that’s unsubtle minds unused to turning things on their heads or teasing apart meaning. Blunt tools rather than fine instruments. Caleb came here to whittle himself down and hone himself into something more dexterous, but he can’t do that if he can’t get through the door.

The riddle, the riddle. It’s written on a stone plinth at the base of one of the labyrinth’s dense trees. He doesn’t ask himself how the Erudite managed to construct such an elaborate feat of greenery without the other factions taking notice; the labyrinth simply is, and his task is to pass through it. He navigated the maze itself easily enough, relying on the slant of the light to choose his direction.

But the riddle.

It is what separates us from each other, he reads, for what must be the hundredth time. Those who don’t have it don’t want it. Those who do have it aren’t aware of it. The only way to be rid of it is to recognize it.

It can’t be a physical object; that just doesn’t make sense. It has to be more abstract than that—conceptual, perhaps. A general term rather than a specific one. Walls? he wonders. They separate people. But no—the rest of the riddle doesn’t make sense if “walls” is the answer. He searches his mind for an alternative. The only way to be rid of it is to recognize it.

He’s not used to this kind of paralysis. He didn’t have it at the Choosing Ceremony, though the stress of what he was about to do made him feel like a stretched rubber band. He was distracted by his own grief, and so was everyone else. But he can’t fool this labyrinth by controlling his behavior; he has to solve the riddle.

The Candor boy steps forward, past the stone plinth to the stone lion that waits beyond it. He bends down and whispers his guess into the lion’s ear. Caleb doesn’t know what will happen if he’s wrong—will he simply have to try again, or is one wrong answer enough for the labyrinth to eject someone, exiling them to the factionless? He doesn’t find out. The Candor boy’s guess is correct; the leaves part to form an archway, and the Candor boy disappears beneath it.

It’s just Caleb, Felicity, and the panicking Erudite boy, now.

“I used to like riddles,” Felicity says, her voice shaking. “Not so much, anymore.”

“We’re not supposed to help each other,” Caleb replies. He doesn’t want her help, anyway. He wants to solve this on his own; he wants to break through this blankness in his mind and find out what’s on the other side of it. He presses down on the bandage still wrapped around his arm, from where glass pierced it at the Choosing Ceremony attack. The pain doesn’t help him focus, like he hoped. It just hurts.

“Fine,” Felicity says. “Stay here all night for all I care, Prior.”

She steps forward and offers her answer to the stone lion. The archway opens for her.

Caleb and the Erudite boy are alone.